If you’re like us Monday morning often feels like you’re bobbing about in the doldrums, thick headed and less than creative. And how are you going to come up with the next big thing in that sort of a state?

Simple. Outsource your thinking to the handy Idea Generator, which is how I came up with this week’s project: building a transparent rubber car. It was between that and a prefab concrete event, but I floated concrete decks one summer in college, I’m not falling for that one again.

Then there was the multilingual holographic sound system, but there’s already a Tron re-make in the works and I was worried about possible patent lawsuits. Transparent rubber car it is.

Continue Reading “Idea Generator: an Easy Way to Automate Your Thinking” »

The recent flurry of activity and new features from the Google Maps team has led Techcrunch to speculate that Maps older sibling, Google Earth, might be doomed. Duncan Riley’s premise is that “as Google Maps takes on more and more of the functionality of Google Earth the appeal of Earth must diminish.”

We could give a whole host of very logical reasons why this is just a Digg bait headline, but where’s the fun that? The real reason Google Earth will continue? The Onion has released a Google Earth layer.

The new layer, dubbed Our Dumb World, coincides with the Onion’s new atlas of the same name and provides an insightful guide to earth as the Onion knows it. And if the Onion is joining in on the fun, you know it’s here to stay.

[via O'Reilly Radar]

Do you think Black Friday refers to arrival of the Bubonic Plague and Cyber Monday is just something we telecommuters have to face every week? For those of us clueless enough to have spent the biggest shopping weekend of the year “scouting locations in the Smoky Mountains for an epic machinima Civil War drama starring the voice talents of Judd Nelson and Leonard Nimoy” and other such diversion, even the exact date of Christmas can be a mystery.

But never fear, as always, the web can help. If all the pre-Christmas shopping hoopla has you somewhat confused as to when the annual celebration of rampant consumerism actually occurs, stop by isitchristmas.com to track the upcoming holiday.

And of course a site like this would be useless without an RSS feed.

And just for the record, Judd Nelson has tentatively been replaced by Judge Reinhold, with Sean Penn voicing the evil twin brother.

[via Micro Persuasion]

The coding turkeys at Malevolent Design have created the Lolinator, a re-rendering engine which "gives us a terrifying glimpse into an alternate dimension where LOLcats created the web."

Every website you feed into the Lolinator has its HTML mangled and reassembled by the LOLcats, resulting in a display of LOLtxt on top of wizard-laden, butterfly-backgrounded muck. Even images are Lolinated.

Here’s Slashdot, Techmeme (that one is good), Apple and our very own siet, Compiler. Unfortunately, Wired News was far too huge and awesome and bursting with killer content for the Lolinator to parse properly. It spit an error.

It’s obvious the Malevolent Design group has been tinkering with that alien genius ray we discovered. Even though they brashly disregarded a direct order to keep their hands to themselves, we’re going to let this one slide.

[kthx, Eliot]